The Rebelle blog

There is this thing about reading that is unique and personal to each. It awakens feelings and thoughts that one could not have conjured while sitting idly. Although that is too much of an overstatement to be true. But whenever I share my reads on a public platform like Goodreads or Instagram where book stories are put under the hashtag of bookstagram , I feel the result is pretty much the same as sharing them with someone in person. There are so many amazing people who are bold, uninhibited and clear while speaking their mind, especially on the internet. Some of them have become such good friends of mine even though we haven't met or have no possibility of meeting in the near future. I am sounding more like the pessimist but it is true, sadly.  One can't live on books and thus is effectively proved in a book I read two days ago. It's called, The House of Paper written by Carlos Dominguez . It came as a very timely shocker and a reminder to me since I was drifting in...

"Let us try to open our minds to a new idea." I met so many amazing women this year and I wish to acknowledge them all. Some younger than me, a few older than my mother; all of them inspired me with their compassionate and kind demeanour. I believe I learned some great life lessons from all of them. I met some in movies and books and for me they are as real as the ones I met in flesh and blood. There are ideas and energies that keep me on the brim of unexplored territories and sharing them with all these encouraging women has resulted in a far better reality than I could have anticipated. Our power lies in our being and radiating that knowing to those beneath us and creating opportunities for their own exaltation. My being sketchy about the year gone by is just another example of how much we share happiness around us. Our constant whirlwind engages us in a stupor far more controlling our life's reins than we ought to permit it.  I became part of some conversatio...

I wrote a short story and shared it with a friend for his reviews. Now, I am unable to improve upon on the suggested changes. I am stuck. I now understand what a writer's bloc is. It feels like I can't progress beyond what I had originally penned down. Sometimes, it becomes so important to change the course of things in our own way. My friend's suggestions are excellent and all are completely relevant, I still, however can't come to terms with an alternate solution for replacing situations in the story. Partly because, I was the character who lived through every word and moment of the story.  Suddenly it feels like I am being thwarted from my seat by a force that wants me to be more angry and powerful than I am in the story. My emotions need to be more raw and hard than I let them to be. It is difficult for me to transgress into an unknown territory of emotional upheavals particularly when I lived through the characters' persona. Nevertheless, I keep reminding...

Conformity may give you a quiet life; it may even bring you to a University Chair. But all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no dissenters, we should still be living in caves.  -A.J.P. Taylor, historian (25 Mar 1906-1990) I have never been this frustrated with people or events or my country. Sure enough I always remember what John F. Kennedy said about "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Yes, I keep this quote in mind but the current political monkeyism is getting on my nerves. How on earth did we come to this point of having to threaten, thrash, jail, molestate students who are protesting for their rights and exercising their fundamental constitutional right to speech and expression? I am baffled to see the top guns in the government especially the HRD minister who about a week ago cried in Parliament and passionately explained her love and conc...

"One of the things the women’s movement does is to make you feel pain. You have to have a lot of courage to accept that if you commit yourself, over the long term, not just for three months, not for a year, not for two years, but for a lifetime, to feminism, to the women’s movement, that you are going to live with a lot of pain. In this country that is not a fashionable thing to do. So be prepared for the therapists. And be prepared for the prescriptions. Be prepared for all  the people who tell you that it’s your problem, it’s not a social problem, and why are you so bitter, and what’s wrong with you? And underneath that is always the presumption that the rape was delusional, that the battery did not happen, that the economic hardship is your own unfortunate personal failing. Hold onto the fact that that’s not true: it has never been true." — Andrea Dworkin, “Feminism: An Agenda,” from Letters from a War Zone, 1988 We would have hoped that 16 years into th...

Two things I've come upon after reading books like 'The Beauty Myth' and 'The Unfinished Revolution' is that the cultural and sexual terrorization of women happens all over the world including the richest nations. The other being that this oppression needs more voicing out and a collective united mass movement across the globe. It can't just be conscious in developed countries but equal ferocity needs to be seen in developing and under-developed nations. As I was reading about the plight of the Roma women in Albania and Serbia, the statistics left me shaken. We deny human rights to children, women and the differently- able with a scary intensity. Imagine differentiating between women from South East Asia/Africa/Latin America/Middle East because their cultural and societal norms prevent women from using and asserting their rights to living independent lives. More or less, our language unites us in documenting their tormented stories because they are same ev...

http://theladiesfinger.com/2015-is-ending-where-are-the-women/ And while we read this article, I am also reading about the murder of Allison Baden-Clay, 43, a Brisbane resident who was killed by her husband in April 2012 and now the court verdict is out wherein he won the appeal against his murder conviction instead being accused of manslaughter. So yes, such judgements get passed not only in India but everywhere in the world. A woman is murdered and all the court does is convicts her husband of manslaughter, not murder. How convenient for the judiciary! The Reeva Steenkamp murder verdict proved how blinded the legal system is! Her cold blooded murderer got away with an 'accidental self-defence' argument. He'll live the rest of his life, alive and doing things while that young woman will lay forgotten. That is what is happening with women! We don't exist- we don't matter, unless we speak up. At least a voice is a reminder to the other gender to look around and s...

Sometimes I wish I'd documented all my thoughts about dismantling patriarchy in a diary or a journal when I was younger. I wish this now, because I recently read some letters I'd written to a distant friend on role of women in workplaces and this uneven household/work system. And I realised my thoughts on certain books like Wuthering Heights or Virginia Woolf's writings and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar have undergone a slight change. Maybe I was young, back when I first read these books. I was disappointed by the portrayal of women and it marred my understanding about the quality of life 19th century women lived in. SO, the thoughts on tramping patriarchy also arose from two recent incidents seen in India. One, the Happy to Bleed project which started as a reaction to some Temple Trustee's atrocious remarks against menstruating women in Kerala, by women of all age groups on Twitter and other social media. The other is the story of a woman breaking a 400 year old t...

Wow, going by the hate barrage I'm subjected to and almost being deemed as a fanatic on facebook for voicing my dissent against capital punishment, I would say- We have such a long journey to make towards being a civil society. Two things I've understood clearly. One, that we hate minorities from the core of our heart, and two, we cannot tolerate being held inferior to other religions apart from our own. There are a lot of other issues too that I've started understanding better now. It's really tragic but also welcoming to finally see the true face of people concealing themselves with a 'progressive broadminded citizen' mask after all. When they talk of such hate spewed words for a religious minority group in India, they are really violating their Fundamental Duties accorded to them by the Constitution. But, of course, who really cares about fundamental duties as long as we have all the rights and the 'righteous' leaders seeking to right the wrong done...